Un Portrait d'une vieille femme
by Valieara
Summary: Glinda in portraiture, now and then.


**Disclaimer:** I own nothing, but Gregory Maguire, Stephen Schwartz, _et al. _do; for fun, not profit; etc.

**Setting/Spoilers:** While I suppose you could look at this with a musicalverse slant, I wrote this with bookverse in mind, which is where Crage Hall and such comes from. Otherwise, as long as you either know or acknowledge that Glinda and Elphaba went to university together, you're good.

**Notes:** For those who know nothing of hats, and because I have made a hat such as I imagine Glinda would have worn, I can say with some assurance that certain styles have a delicate inner frame which may also be referred to as a skeleton. The title translates to "portrait of an old woman." And there you have it.

* * *

It was always an inevitability that the life of Lady Glinda Chuffery _née _Arduenna would be much written of when the tacitly approved amount of time had passed, and then in great detail; and so no one, the lady herself included, was rather surprised when there was one picture chosen seemingly by consensus of biographers, readers, and critics alike, to represent her life in sumptuous detail and no words at all.

It was quiet and anonymous; and like all photographs of the era, it was colored in sepia and tinged with age and regrets. Where it was unearthed from, and by whom, Glinda would never know.

Crage Hall crowded the background, though not in a menacing way, while trees she remembered well as reaching just a few feet above her room's window – as proved by the photograph, in all its sad shades – were still in their proper place. In the years since, they had grown into each other in a terrible show of slow competition, all tangled limbs and angry growth by this point; and the sight of it had left Glinda oddly disconsolate on a whim of a visit to her _alma mater_. There had been, and was still, a courtyard of sorts formed by the trunks and branches of oaks and cypresses surrounding the backmost entrance to Crage Hall, but now it was all a brash mess of no sunlight and dying leaves, a natural trellis that had become naturally malformed, too dense with life to sustain itself.

In this courtyard of days past stood two girls, neither of whom paid any mind to the camera, if of course they'd been aware of its presence at all.

The girl in the forefront was wearing a pale yellow dress, cut in – dare she even think it? Goodness, she had grown old – a very period style that hearkened to the time and, again, her own age. Her hat was caught in still motion, tumbling end-over-end down her back in a stream of shining ribbons and a show of crowning skeleton, light and pretty and delicate. She'd been just eighteen, Glinda remembered, indulging in a by-then-rare moment of abandon, arms spread to the side with palms stretching sunward and her face turned the same way in some silly moment of misguided phototropism, and her smile was brilliant in an intensity of its own. She could just recall smiling just so, if she put some thought into it.

She did so now, and a smile graced her face in a shadow of its memory.

The girl behind her was half hidden in the blurred shadows memory would always bring, even had the resolution of the picture itself not been there to reinforce it. She was rather dark-complected, but not so much so as to compared to the western Arjikis, and the only sure thing about her was that her dark hair was lustrous, even to the camera's untrained eye and in spite of the paper's reluctance to show it. Her fingers curled naturally around the waist of Glinda's eighteen-year-old image; and while the girl's thin mouth seemed to have some stricture as to her ability or willingness to smile, some form of either happiness or amusement – though it was not entirely clear which – was evident around her eyes.

Glinda remembered this moment well enough by her memory's standards, and could say a few things about it if she'd possessed the inclination to do so; but as it was, when she was questioned about the occasion, she said:

"You must excuse me, it was a long time ago;"

for it was, nearly sixty years past; and when she was questioned about the blitheness of her younger self, she replied:

"The rigors of old age will take their toll;"

and when she was questioned about the identity of the second girl in the photograph, she lamented:

"Can an old woman be expected to remember such details?"

There was little else to say on the subject.


End file.
